In my paper I will be investigating how bring a slave impacted the writings of Franklin Douglass. Douglas was born in 1818 and died in 1895, he was known to be one of the most influential African American leaders in the nineteenth century. He lived with Hugh Auld and his wife Sophia Auld in 1826 when his mother original owner died. Sophia tried to teach Douglass to read but her husband believed that learning “would forever unfit him to be a slave”, he wanted to prevent Douglass because he did not want him to aspire to be anything else but a slave. Nevertheless, Douglass found a way to learn how to read and write and began to read about abolition movements in the Baltimore American and also started to form a close bond with a freed slave, Charles
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He first talks about “no accurate knowledge of my age” (Norton1; Norton1; Norton2). In the age of slavery many blacks had no clue how old they were and at a young age Douglass came to the realization that “white children could tell their ages” and he could not so he began to question it, this was one of the first impacts on his writing. At the beginning of his narrative, Douglass wants the readers to know how old he is but because he is not completely sure of his age he has to explain to readers his process of thinking to figure out his age, “The nearest estimate I can give makes me now between twenty-seven and twenty-eight years of age. I come to this, from hearing my master say, some time during 1835, I was about seventeen years old” (Norton2). Douglass also believed that his father was also his master, this effected him as a person and he wrote about it in his Narrative, “The master is frequently compelled to sell this class of slaves, out of deference to his white wife; and, cruel as the deed may strike any one to be, for a man to sell his own children to human flesh-mongers, it is often the dictate of humanity for him to do so” (Norton2). Douglass was not kept with the master he thought was his father, he wrote about how he knew of children who were not sold because their owners were also a “parenteral partiality”. While I was reading The Narrative I definitely felt a strong sense of hatred for whites that do this in the writing style and it is most likely from the fact that Douglass believed that his father sold him and it definitely impacted the way he saw and wrote about
He first talks about “no accurate knowledge of my age” (Norton1; Norton1; Norton2). In the age of slavery many blacks had no clue how old they were and at a young age Douglass came to the realization that “white children could tell their ages” and he could not so he began to question it, this was one of the first impacts on his writing. At the beginning of his narrative, Douglass wants the readers to know how old he is but because he is not completely sure of his age he has to explain to readers his process of thinking to figure out his age, “The nearest estimate I can give makes me now between twenty-seven and twenty-eight years of age. I come to this, from hearing my master say, some time during 1835, I was about seventeen years old” (Norton2). Douglass also believed that his father was also his master, this effected him as a person and he wrote about it in his Narrative, “The master is frequently compelled to sell this class of slaves, out of deference to his white wife; and, cruel as the deed may strike any one to be, for a man to sell his own children to human flesh-mongers, it is often the dictate of humanity for him to do so” (Norton2). Douglass was not kept with the master he thought was his father, he wrote about how he knew of children who were not sold because their owners were also a “parenteral partiality”. While I was reading The Narrative I definitely felt a strong sense of hatred for whites that do this in the writing style and it is most likely from the fact that Douglass believed that his father sold him and it definitely impacted the way he saw and wrote about